“We do a phenomenal job of providing first-rate education for our students here. Now we need to ensure that our students gain the kind of global fluencies and experiences that will enable them to become leaders in whatever field they decide.” — Joseph Wong

“The Leave campaign was founded on lies about the cost of the EU, the capacity of Britain to control immigration outside the EU, and the UK’s capacity to negotiate trade deals with other countries.” — Randall Hansen

For the last four months, Munk School student Naveeda Hussain served as a political intern at the Canadian embassy in Burma where she witnessed firsthand the aftermath of that country’s return to civilian rule after years of military dictatorship.

“When we look around the world today, from Syria to Yemen to the Central African Republic to North Korea, we are confronted with millions of ordinary people who fear for the freedom and security of their lives every day.” — Tina Park

“We have been excluded from the central defence meeting on dislodging ISIS from northern Iraq. No amount of spin can hide that.” — Randell Hansen, director of the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

“Given the University of Toronto’s international and national leadership in research and education, it is only fitting that we also take a leadership role in responding to the TRC’s calls for action.” — Vice-President and Provost Cheryl Regehr.

Turkey alone is home to more than two million refugees, many of whom have been languishing there for decades. And they’re not just from Syria — Turkey is also overwhelmed by asylum-seekers from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Somalia, says U of T student Alizee Zapparoli-Manzoni-Bodson.

Thanks to U of T’s Impact Centre, people in rural parts of the Philippines may soon get access to something that the western world takes for granted: being able to walk into a dark room, flick a switch and get instant light.

Paul Gries has been teaching computer science at the University of Toronto since 1999. After 16 years, the senior lecturer is used to students mistakenly calling him professor, but thanks to a recent change in university policy, he won’t have to make the correction any longer.

Reactions to the ongoing Ebola crisis in West Africa have been varied – from cancelled flights to highly-publicized quarantines to heroic efforts by nurses and doctors to treat the afflicted. Many people are trying to help out however they can, including Stefanie Carmichael, a U of T alumna now working for the United Nations.

Ho is affiliated with the Centre for Global Child Health at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, where she works with nutritional sciences and pediatrics professor Stanley Zlotkin, the developer of “Sprinkles,” sachets of powder containing enough micronutrients for one child for one day.

Danielle de Carle was terrified. The University of Toronto ecology and evolutionary biology student was alone in the Peruvian rain forest – for once without a headlamp – with monkeys, birds and insects creating a cacophony of noise around her.

LGBT rights vary considerably in Europe – even within the European Union, Pelz says. For example, according to the European LGBT rights group ILGA’s Rainbow Europe scale, on a scale of 1 to 100 in terms of strength of LGBT rights, England rates 82, France 64, and Italy only 25. Pelz attributes the differences to a number of reasons, such as level of economic development, religiosity, history and constructions of national identity.

When Betty Xie and her small film crew of U of T students travelled to Taiwan in 2012 to make an election documentary, they thought the politics would be simple — voters who identified as Chinese would support the Koumingtang, voters who identified as Taiwanese would support the Democratic Progressive Party.

The slogan “Think globally, act locally” could have been coined especially for Gabilan Sivapatham. Born and raised in Toronto’s St. James Town neighbourhood, Sivapatham is applying what he learned in the Life Sciences’ global health option to helping his own community.